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Art Evolution 1: Jeff Laubenstein

Art Evolution 1: Jeff Laubenstein

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a2-slavers2I’m a gamer, a lifer, someone who at the age of thirty-nine doesn’t get to roll dice like it did at nineteen, but I still take a week’s vacation every year to hang out with High School friends and revisit campaigns where characters have been on paper long enough to legally drink in the U.S.

My love for fantasy role-playing goes back to middle school. There, I was introduced to Dungeon’s & Dragons, but it wasn’t just the concept that inspired my love affair, it was the art. The first piece of fantasy role-playing art I ever saw was the module A2: Secrets of the Slavers Stockade.

I stared at it for a full hour in History class; flipped through the pages trying to figure out why the cover wasn’t stapled on, and went home convinced this was something I had to get involved in.

Enter the Sears Christmas catalogue and TSR’s D&D Basic Edition red boxed set. Once I saw Larry Elmore’s red dragon and seemingly endless treasure trove, I convinced my mother to order it and began a journey lasting nearly thirty years.

I still buy gaming supplements for art alone, collecting entire genres and systems knowing full well I will never have the time to play them. If you put a great cover on it there’s a good chance I’ll buy, and I devour new talent almost as fast as I’ll snap up a collector’s piece from the seventies or eighties on eBay.

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Imaro: The Naama War

Imaro: The Naama War

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imaro_the_naama_warImaro: The Naama War
Charles R. Saunders (Sword & Soul Media, 2009)

Here we have the long-awaited fourth volume in the “Imaro” series of sword-and-sorcery novels set in a fictional fantasy Africa. Imaro: The Naama War brings to a conclusion the many character arcs and plotlines that have built through Imaro (1981; revised 2006), Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush (1984; revised 2008), and Imaro: The Trail of Bohu (1985; revised 2009). The third book (which was the first written specifically as a novel instead of a collection of novellas and short stories) moves the tale of the Ilyassai warrior Imaro into the territory of the grand epic, threatening to plunge all of the continent of Nyumbani into a battle between the gods and the kingdoms they support, with Imaro as the fulcrum point. The novel ends on a cliffhanger, with the war about to erupt.

Now at last we have that great battle of gods and men, which Saunders started writing back in 1983. And it’s Epic. Big Capital “E” Epic. Charles R. Saunders more than rewards readers’ twenty-five years of patience with the single best installment in the saga of Imaro. This is sword-and-sorcery beauty, filled with bloody rage, bizarre magic, pounding battles, horrific monsters, and intense emotion. It is one of the best fantasy novels I have read over the past five years—and I’m actually glad I came late to reading the Imaro stories, because it means I didn’t have to wait so long to read the last and the best.

Imaro: The Naama War is the sort of fantasy trip I love to take, and I’ll admit that I felt an enormous rush of emotion and nearly came to tears during the thirty page wrap-up, where Saunders refuses to let the reader go from the passion of the story and the characters’ dramatic journeys. The escalation from the beginning to the unexpected conclusion is pitch-perfect. It is almost a textbook for how to build suspense and keep readers reeling with surprises while also maintaining their belief in the story’s inner truth.

So, yeah, this is kind of a good book. (Buy it here!)

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A Review of Jack the Giant Killer, by Charles de Lint

A Review of Jack the Giant Killer, by Charles de Lint

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jackJack the Giant Killer, by Charles de Lint
Ace (202 pages, hardcover, November 1987)

Charles de Lint’s Jack the Giant Killer is an urban fantasy novel, but it feels more accurate to call it an urban fairy tale. It’s set in Ottawa and makes frequent references to streets and landmarks; I have a feeling I’d get even more out of it if I were the least bit familiar with the city. Fortunately, geographic familiarity is not required to enjoy this story.

Jacky Rowan has just been through a moderately poor breakup. Her boyfriend stormed out after declaring her a predictable, boring shut-in. Partly because of his accusations, partly because of feeling empty and numb, she cuts off her waist-length hair, goes drinking, and then wanders down to a park, reflecting on her life and whether or not it means anything.

She has a distinct impression of someone watching her from the blacked-out windows of one house, but before she has time to reflect on that, she witnesses what appears to be a biker gang chasing down what looks like a small man.

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Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part III)

Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part III)

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William MorrisThis is the third in a series of posts looking at the question of who wrote the first otherworld fantasy: that is, the first fantasy to be set entirely in its own fictional world, with no connection to conventional reality at all. It’s an innovation traditionally ascribed to William Morris, but I think I’ve found an earlier writer who deserves that honor.

In the first post, I considered how to identify a fictional otherworld. I suggested four characteristics, of which a story’s fictional world needed to have at least three to be a true otherworld: its own logic (which might involve, say, the existence of magic), characters who we identified as residents of another world than our own, a coherent history, and a coherent fictional geography. In the second post, I considered ways in which older fantasies were linked to reality — by being set in the past, or in a place beyond contemporary knowledge, or being established as a dream, or as a story within a story, or as a myth. I concluded by discussing what I felt was significant about the idea of otherworld fantasy.

Before going on to present my suggestion for the writer of the first otherworld fantasy, though, I’d like to take a closer look at some past fantasies I thought came very close to presenting self-contained otherworlds. These are works which I don’t think are true otherworld fantasies, but which other people might choose to see as such.

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Of Policed Identities and Public Urination: A Review of The City & The City

Of Policed Identities and Public Urination: A Review of The City & The City

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city2The City and the City is a murder mystery. That is the first thing. Miéville makes it perfectly clear: the book explicitly follows the rhythms of this genre, the steps as strictly defined as the rules of a sonnet: the death, the jaded, world-weary but still tender-hearted investigator, the discovery that the victim was not quite what she seemed, the additional deaths, the dead ends and red herrings, the gathering momentum, the Explanation between murderer and detective, slotting all the puzzle pieces together in front of all the characters assembled, the wry denouement.

And the fact that an almost superciliously correct mystery can blend so perfectly with the surreality of a fantasy of superimposed cities is due to the fact that, as Miéville says in the Random House Reader’s Circle interview at the end of the book, the crime novel is “at its best, a kind of dream fiction masquerading as a logic puzzle. All the best noir – or at least I should say the stuff I like most – reads oneirically. Chandler and Kafka seem to me to have a lot more shared terrain then Chandler and a true-crime book.”

Spoilers below the cut. Don’t read them. It just tied for the 2010 Best Novel Hugo – just go read the book!

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Short Fiction Roundup: And the winners are…

Short Fiction Roundup: And the winners are…

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The 2010 Hugo Award winners for various short fiction categories:6a00d8341ce22f53ef0105365ac432970c-200wi1

Best Novella: “Palimpsest” by Charles Stross (Wireless)

Best Novellette: “The Island” by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)

Best Short Story: “Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s 1/09)

And the best semiprozine goes to an online pub: Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, & Cheryl Morgan, the current issue of which features stories by Robert Reed and Stephen Gaskell.

Dragon*Con Report Part 2

Dragon*Con Report Part 2

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dragonconlogoI said a few words about Dragon*Con itself in Part 1 of my con report.  In this one, I’d like to share our experiences at the largest science fiction and fantasy convention in North America.

After a long  journey,  Black Gate publisher John O’Neill and I reached  Atlanta late Thursday afternoon. Reviews Editor Bill Ward acted as our elite scout, and was not only waiting with con badges, but had scoped out the route we’d need to follow to unload our boxes and boxes of Black Gate magazines and vintage science fiction paperbacks. While John and I have been corresponding with Bill Ward for several years, we’d never before met him in person, and it was a pleasure to be able to do so. Bill proved to be just as indispensable, organized, and articulate as he is online, and possessed a dry, quick wit as well.

Jason Waltz, owner of Rogue Blades Entertainment, shared a quarter of the booth with us, and although he and his friend John Whitman had driven down from Milwaukee and we had driven down from Illinois and Indiana, we somehow arrived within a few minutes of each other without coordination. I doubt it would have worked out as well if we’d actually planned it. Between the five of us we managed to get all the Black Gate gear and RBE gear unloaded within an hour. Unpacking it and putting it on display took a bit longer, and required additional time the following morning.

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English Gothic: Britain Goes to the Movies

English Gothic: Britain Goes to the Movies

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english-gothic2Jonathan Rigby’s ENGLISH GOTHIC (2000) is an excellent survey of British horror and science fiction films. Misleadingly subtitled A CENTURY OF HORROR CINEMA; the book focuses instead on the 20 year period from THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955) through TO THE DEVIL, A DAUGHTER (1976) when British production companies like Hammer, Amicus, and Tigon consistently outperformed the Hollywood majors in producing the finest and most influential genre films.

Part of the book’s strength is not just Rigby’s detailed and chronological survey of nearly every genre film to come from the British Isles during these two decades, but the fact that he captures the social and economic factors that helped shape the pictures and, more importantly, the public’s reception to them.

The rise of the horror genre in film started with the German Expressionist classics of the silent era and the contemporary Lon Chaney and John Barrymore efforts in the States. The genre solidified with the phenomenal impact of Universal’s horror franchises of the 1930s and 1940s.

The interesting thing here is that the majority of these films remained unscreened or else limited to adult-only audiences in the UK where censorship was extremely puritanical in the first half of the last century.

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Goth Chick News: Would You Like Some Wine With That Cheese?

Goth Chick News: Would You Like Some Wine With That Cheese?

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image006Before this, I was already obsessed with my Wii gaming system. On evenings following particularly stressful bouts at my “day job,” I can generally be found playing House of the Dead 3 on two-person mode; armed with the pistol in one hand and the machine gun in the other. Nothing says “stress relief” like laying waste Rambo-style to a seemingly endless parade of the undead.

Needless to say, everyone knows better than to ring my cell phone during “killing dead things” time, which is a lot like “story time” if I had kids, only different.

But obsession went a step further to borderline mania when Netflix introduced their “instant download” option using gaming systems like the Wii and Xbox. With a bit of simple programming, a wireless modem and a $2 monthly subscription, you can choose from an impressive menu of movie options, downloading with the lightening speed I can only dream about for my laptop internet connection; such as a two hour movie in under 15 seconds.

Add this to my wet bar and bathroom, and frankly I see no compelling reason to ever come out of the basement.

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The Weird of Cornell Woolrich: “Kiss of the Cobra”

The Weird of Cornell Woolrich: “Kiss of the Cobra”

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lair_of_the_white_wormNo, this isn’t a review of the Ken Russell film The Lair of the White Worm. The poster just fits so well with Cornell Woolrich’s 1935 story “Kiss of the Cobra” that I had to use it. You would almost think Russell was adapting Woolrich, not Bram Stoker.

My three previous installments exploring the fantasy and horror tales of suspense author Cornell Woolrich have all looked at classic works from his typewriter: “Jane Brown’s Body,” “Dark Melody of Madness,” and “Speak to Me of Death.” However, Woolrich was a prolific pulpster, and sometimes he pounded out sub-par work because the hotel room bill had to be paid. Any Woolrich fan can whip out a list of the writer’s suspense stories that simply made him or her cringe—and not positively. I’m as hardcore a Woolrich aficionado as you will likely find, and even I have to admit that some of his lesser stories are dreadful. His exploration of vampires, one of his potentially intriguing side trips into the supernatural, “Vampire’s Honeymoon” (later revised and retitled “My Lips Destroy” so Woolrich could sell it as a “new” piece), is the single most clichéd work about vampires I’ve ever read. Only the staking of a vampire using a broken hockey stick makes it remotely interesting. I can’t imagine Woolrich spent more than two hours cranking it out and then sending it off. It’s an indication of the power of Cornell Woolrich’s name on the front of pulp magazines of the time that it sold on its first try.

But some of Woolrich’s mid-level work deserves attention, and “Kiss of the Cobra” falls solidly into his opus of “weird stories.” It examines the concept of “foreign other” with fantasy displays that hint at black magic, contains richly sensual prose, and has a liminal sense of a were-creature. The suspense and hard-boiled crime aspects are also well executed, even if the mesh of the two sides isn’t that smooth. Much greater work was to come, but with all its flaws (such as the standard pulp era’s Euro-centric view of India and a protagonist given to generic wise-crack dialogue) the story remains worth visiting for horror and suspense enthusiasts.

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